It’s sad, but true. The consensus among Las Vegas sports books—and they typically know a thing or two about how games and seasons unfold—is our Baltimore Orioles have the longest odds at winning next year’s World Series.

Anywhere from 350-to-1 to 300-to-1, they say.

I guess this shouldn’t be surprising, but it still hurts. The Orioles are in major rebuild mode, and haven’t hired a manager, or a permanent general manager just yet, to lead a roster comprised of what are largely unproven players—and all that after a 115-loss season and the painful teardown of what we knew as the Old Guard. Buck. Manny. Adam. And the rest. (Okay, this is the last time we’ll write their names. Maybe.)

“It’s a process. It’s not going to happen overnight. In baseball, when you’re rebuilding, it takes some time,” first baseman Trey Mancini said on the last day of the season. “You have to get some of the right guys, people have to click, and unfortunately, it might take a couple years. That’s usually the case.”

A couple years? Really? Yes, another one in the sad, but true department. And as each day passes, those low expectations for the start of a new era of O’s baseball unfortunately become more real. Buck (Okay, last time we mention him, really) returned to town a few weeks ago to hold a previously scheduled charity event at Camden Yards, and he mentioned he and wife, Angela, sold their tractor, mower, and land at their Baltimore-area home, and would be holding an estate sale. That was two days before former Oriole Steve Pearce won 2018 World Series MVP with the Red Sox, after crushing three home runs in five games against Machado’s Los Angeles Dodgers.

Meanwhile, at the current moment, the O’s are like a schooner floating in the bay without a captain while powerboats zip by. John and Louis Angelos, now in control of the team’s day-to-day operations, have reportedly interviewed a few candidates to be the team’s top executive from a broad list of targets—including Houston Astros assistant general manager Mike Elias (analytics, man!), former Red Sox and current Blue Jays assistant GM Ben Cherington, and former Dodgers GM Ned Colletti. But Orioles player development director Brian Graham is still the point person for the roster in an interim role.

Whoever the next front office leader is will hire the next manager, but that’s a way’s off, even as major league baseball’s free-agent signing period has already begun.

That means the guys we used to know—Machado and Jones (Okay, last time, seriously. That’s it), the latter who will be back in Baltimore Thanksgiving weekend for a Boys & Girls Clubs charity tailgate—now have the chance to sign with new teams. But it’s doubtful anyone will want to come here given the lack of clarity in leadership. The O’s are the only team in baseball without a general manager right now.

Aside from a few in-their-prime leftovers from last season—like Mancini, pitcher Dylan Bundy and prospective closer Mychal Givens—and a handful of second-year pros, you’re unlikely to be familiar with the O’s Opening Day roster come April. They don’t even know who they are yet.

So, as much we want the Vegas odds-makers to be wrong, they’re probably right. On the bright side, an Orioles World Series win next October would give you the greatest return on investment of any baseball bet you could make right now. If you ever wanted to turn $10 into $3,500, no strings attached and for a good cause, this is the time to take a chance.

History to be made at Poly-City game.
On Saturday at M&T Bank Stadium, Jacey Lee, 16, a junior at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, will become the first girl to take the field in the school’s 129-year football rivalry with Baltimore City College. She initially joined Poly’s JV team after her stepbrother invited her to come practice with him, and Lee is the first girl to ever make varsity. Lee is 5-foot-4 and plays defensive tackle. “I like hitting,” she told The Sun. “As soon as I get off, somebody is in my face. I either got to push them, or they push me.”

Joe’s back—again.
It’s hard to believe, but a little over a week since he took a violent hit to the head that left him concussed, Joe Flacco says he’s ready to play Sunday when the Ravens face the Tennessee Titans in Nashville. Flacco went through the NFL’s concussion protocol and was cleared to practice fully on Wednesday, albeit with stitches covered with tape on his left ear, where his helmet was ripped off by Miami Dolphins linebacker Kiko Alonso last Thursday night. Offensive coordinator Marty Mornhinweg joked with reporters yesterday that Flacco should have used his stitches to scare kids on Halloween. Joe Cool predictably didn’t, but he did post a throwback photo from 1995 in which a Frankenstein did appear.

WWE rolls through Royal Farms.
It’s not really a sport, though maybe there’s still some out there that think pro wrestling is real and not scripted. Anyway, WWE Raw made a stop at Royal Farms Arena on Monday Night. The highlight in wrestling circles was Samoa Joe’s return to the ring, and it seems like everyone had a good time.

Maryland women’s basketball picked second in Big Ten.
What?! The Big Ten coaches and media picked the defending conference champion Terps to finish second in the league, behind Ohio State. Though they might be in a rebuild mode, after losing two All-Americans and seeing a National Freshman of the Year transfer, consider it motivation for one of the area’s top programs in any sport. Maryland begins the season next Friday against Albany.

The Astros give us hope . . .
The smaller-market team formerly known as the Houston “Lastros” (for obvious reasons) won the World Series on Wednesday night in Game 7 against the Los Angeles Dodgers. Three years ago, in a prophetic cover, Sports Illustrated featured eventual World Series MVP George Springer alongside the headline “Your 2017 World Series Champs,” referencing the idea that the Astros were building the game’s “next big thing,” with a blend of old-fashioned scouting and new-age statistical analytics. It might be a bit of a stretch to see our Orioles in the same light, but the Astros should at least give us some inspiration that a championship-caliber team can be built in short time. You heard it here first: O’s in 2020.

And if we needed more optimism and feel good-vibes going into the weekend, Astros shortstop Carlos Correa proposed to his girlfriend Daniella Rodriguez right after his team took the national title. Good luck topping that, every other guy on the planet.

Anyway, congrats on being ridiculously, ridiculously good looking, Jake. Also, yeah, on that World Series win.

Dexter Fowler made the right choice (can we still resent him?).
We have no animosity toward Jake Arrieta. He got traded and he excelled with his new team. Good for him. It’s what baseball is all about. Dexter Fowler, on the other hand, goes into the dread John Elway category of “Guys Who Out and Out Rejected Baltimore.” Just to jog your memory, in the off-season, the Os were poised to sign Fowler—the speedy center fielder and lead-off man—to a three-year contract. Os fans were, understandably, stoked. Then, without explanation or warning, Fowler reversed course and re-signed with his old team, the Cubs. Obviously, that worked out well for him, but left us in the lurch, with a shaky lead-off-hitter-by-committee lineup. It could be argued that the Os never fully recovered from that snub. Never forget!

Steelers Ravens play meaningful football on Sunday.
It’s a down year for the AFC North and that’s a good thing for the Ravens. To wit: Even with the Ravens recent Period of Suck, they still have a chance to be tied with the Steelers for the top slot in the AFC North! Sure, tied at an inauspicious 4-4, but we’ll take it. We love playing our rival Steelers. We love it even more when first place is on the line.

Jake Layman goes off.
It’s a good week for guys with Maryland ties named Jake. Former Terps forward Jake Layman, who I once called the “Terps Player Most Likely to Date Taylor Swift” absolutely went off in his NBA debut, scoring 17 points in eight minutes for the Portland Trail Blazers, while drilling 5 three pointers. In the process, he scored the second most points by a Trailblazer (after All-Star Damian Lillard) in his rookie debut and tied an NBA record (!) for most three-pointers in a rookie debut. Mind you, all in 8 minutes. Okay, so the points came in garbage time and the Blazers lost the game, but something tells us Jake is about to be seeing a lot more playing time.

No, your eyes are not deceiving you.
In an exhibition game, the Lady Terps beat Bluefield State 146-17, with the Terps holding the “Big Blue” scoreless in the second half (72-0). If you’re shaky on your math, that’s a 129 point blow-out. So weigh in, folks: Should the Terps have laid back, stopped competing, and let the score be more respectable (especially since it was just an exhibition game)? Or is it actually more disrespectful to stop competing hard? Hmmm.

Essay by Jon Miller, 40-year veteran broadcaster, and the Orioles play-by-play man from 1983 to 1996.

“As a teenager in the 1960s, I was an Orioles fan primarily because of Brooks Robinson. It wasn’t Brooks’s statistics per se, it was the whole persona. I used to love to go to the Oakland Coliseum in the late 1960s really because I wanted to see Brooks. I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. He looked like somebody who didn’t want to be anywhere else—the way he ran onto the field, fielding grounders over to first. He was having the time of his life; there was a joyous aspect. He would inevitably make some spectacular play for which he was famous. He never disappointed. He would dive, charge a bunt, pull off a barehanded pick-up; he would do it all fluidly and beautifully. He turned playing third base into a ballet. The Orioles were also the best team going at the time. They had great players in Brooks, Frank, Boog, Davey Johnson and all those great pitchers, Mike Cuellar, Dave McNally, Jim Palmer—it was really a great team to watch. That’s what drew me to them.

I came to Baltimore in 1983 and stayed through 1996. Before that, I had done Red Sox games, and what I remembered was that, in Boston, there was a real feeling of negativity surrounding the Red Sox. No matter what good things they did, people were pessimistic. Here I come to Baltimore, and, the year before, the O’s lost in a pennant race, which was sort of a bitter disappointment. But what really stood out to me was, the day before opening day, the team had a workout, we all got into these buses and caravanned down to Harborplace, which was a fairly new thing at the time. We get down there, and I believe there were 40,000 to 50,000 people jammed into that area, as if the team had won it all the year before. It was a rally for opening day. There was a whole different feel from Orioles fans than I had encountered from Red Sox fans. Wild Bill led the fans in a couple of rousing cheers. It really gave me goosebumps. I couldn’t wait for opening day.

That team did not disappoint, obviously, and those Oriole cheers continued in the ballpark; Rick Dempsey would often do it from right outside the dugout. It was a scene that was unique to all of baseball. What I didn’t realize, even though they won the whole thing in ’83, was that we were all too close to the end of the run of that great group of players—near the end of Jim Palmer, and Ken Singleton, who had been a great run producer, really his last good year was 1983. A lot of those guys were getting older, and it was, ironically, when Cal Ripken was blossoming. But it was almost the end of that era. The next year, only Eddie and Cal had good years. Some players were older and near the end of their careers. In ’85, they signed free agents, which was a new thing for them. The pitching, which had been the foundation, started looking old for the first time. The team hit well, but the pitching turned very poor. They weren’t even a contender. In 1986, they fell completely into disrepair and had a losing record for the first time in 18 years. The plunge had begun in earnest [capped off by] the 1988 season when we lost 21 straight games to lead off the year, obliterating all records of futility.

But one of my most memorable times occurred in that year, when they came back from a road trip and their record was 1-23, which sounded worse than if they hadn’t won at all somehow. But the fans, through a grassroots level, had formed their own special night at the ballpark. It all started a week-and-a-half prior on a radio station [98 Rock]—a woman called in saying she felt so bad for the guys, every time she turned on the TV, The Tonight Show was making jokes about the Orioles. She said, “I just wish I could tell them all that we’re still behind them. It hasn’t affected our affection for them. They’re still our Orioles, and we love them.” The DJ, Bob Rivers, said, “Maybe you should all go to the game when they get home Monday.” He became sort of the point man for the whole thing. There was this huge run on tickets for that game—they ended up calling it “Fantastic Fan Night”—and it was an extraordinary outpouring of affection. The sold-out ballpark had the same feeling as the World Series that night, and they destroyed the Rangers 9-4. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a game where the fans were the ultimate difference.

I miss Camden Yards. It’s such a great place. I remember the first time we saw it in 1992 when we took the buses over to the ballpark and, instead of just waiting for our bags, everybody to a man on the ball club walked through the tunnels to get a look. It didn’t even seem real. There were just a few lights on; it was nighttime. There was the big warehouse, which just hovered over the scene. The place looked beautiful and surreal at the same time. I also miss watching Cal Ripken and knowing his name would be in the lineup every single day. Cal was a lot of fun to watch—he was always tinkering with his batting stance and never felt like he was a big star. He was always looking for a better way and was out there for every batting and infield practice. He was a stickler for preparation. I don’t think any of us will see anything like that ever again.

After that, there was such a long period of futility, and Orioles fans were not used to that. I think there was just a lot of, not just despair, but ultimately anger that things could have turned out so poorly. Then, all of a sudden, this team showed it’s for real in 2012. As we got into the summer and they kept on doing it and you saw Buck Showalter’s magic, the crowds came back. Not with a Wild Bill Hagy cheer, per se, but with entirely new things. This thing was dormant, but these fans’ affections had never left, they were just waiting for any reason to be unveiled again.”